Dylan clicked up the sidewalk behind Buster. His nostrils tickled with the inhale of sharp cold air, and the welcome smell of wood smoke from houses along the street. The smell would thicken in the later afternoon, as children clattered in from school, and wives warmed homes for their husbands.
“Hold up at the stoop, son.”
Dylan turned, offering his shoulder to his grandmother. But she gestured for him to take a seat. He glanced up, surprised. On warmer days, she would often settle on the stoop watching the street and snapping her beans, or reading a Harlequin romance. She wasn’t partial to cold though. Even in summer, she’d move inside when the sun went down. She looked tired, and something else too. Dylan sat down at the top stoop, feet out, heels together, liking the weight of the new shoes when he wasn’t standing in them. He was surprised his feet now stretched over the edge of the third step down. All summer his bare toes had hung over the second step, not quite touching the third.
Nana was stocky, made more squat by painful rheumatism that lent her a bowlegged waddle. She rested a hand again on his shoulder and eased down next to Dylan, smoothing the fabric of her dress. Dylan didn’t think she owned a pair of pants. Slacks, his grandma called them, with a look reserved for a knotted sack bound for the garbage pail.
They sat in silence, the river’s far bank visible in the distance beyond Mr. Thompson’s drive. Barely lunchtime on a school day. It felt weird to be home, like a dream where he and his friends are in the middle of a baseball game at Mass. He reached down and worried the fur under Buster’s upraised chin.
“Dylan.” Nana rocked back and forth on her bottom. “You understand what happened in the courthouse today?” She looked up at the distant scraping sound as Mr. Thompson dragged his empty trashcan from the curb.
“Well, is James still my brother?”
Nana started, staring at the boy. “What a question. Yes, of course he’s still your brother.”
“Why was daddy crying? Is he still my father?”
Nana sighed, lightly smoothing her dress in a gesture familiar. “You know your father’s been through a bad time. Like a long sickness with no end. Or more like an amputation than being just sick. When you’re ill a long time, you get well, or..” She plucked at an invisible thread on her knee. “He did not deserve such a thing, in a hundred hundred years. Neither of your parents did,” she rushed. Nana stopped, and Dylan wondered what today had to do with that old knot of pain.
“It just broke him,” Nana sighed, as if he’d asked aloud. “And after, when your mother saw your father, she only saw the brokenness, I guess. It wasn’t right for him to leave, but then it wasn’t right to suffer such a thing. Your father maybe hurt deeper, with the blaming. He loves you and James. But it just gets crowded out by the other. Not knowing. That’s unnatural. I wonder some he hasn’t just blown up like a bad bottle of moonshine and drifted away on a hard wind.”
Nana picked at her Sunday dress, her mouth creased.
“Sometimes I think that’d be more the blessing.” Nana spoke to the middle distance, her voice soft and bare. “He’s my own, and I will always love him. I just hope he can make his way back somehow. Blaming himself for something nobody ever could’ve imagined. He loved that boy…well, like he loves you. Like he loved air. Little David went off somewhere, along with your father’s peace.”
Dylan pressed close to his grandma’s bosom, wishing she’d talk about something else. Buster too looped in a tight circle on the bottom step, ready for a change of subject.
“His precious son. All these years. It would’ve been more charitable to just shoot Sam, that is the truth!” Nana’s tight hair bun bobbed up and down beneath her floral pillbox hat.
Dylan felt the hurt rising up. He was eight, but he felt older sometimes, trying to understand the sorrow around him. He never knew David. The second of Sam’s three sons had vanished without a trace the year Dylan was born. David was two years old then. He’d just be turning 10. But James was the only brother he’d known. As long as Dylan could remember, he had lived here with James and Nana. His father had lived here too, until a couple of years ago. Dylan couldn’t recall his mother’s face. He could not remember the house in Berlin, Maryland where he’d been born. He’d been two when Maureen left, and three or four when they’d moved in with Nana.
No one ever talked about his mother. Dylan suspected Nana viewed her poorly for leaving her other two sons. Not because of anything that was said. It was just this unseemly quiet around the subject of her. James would up and leave the room if someone asked after her. Of course, he did the same when someone mentioned his father, Sam. Seems James was leaving a lot.
Nana plucked at a thread on Dylan’s shoulder and smoothed the spot with weathered hands, gnarled fingers accustomed to hard work and no shortcuts.
“Your father did something for you today that he thought needed doing. He understands that he is too sad to raise you proper right now, and he knows how important…”
When Sam had lived here too, after David disappeared, Dylan felt like he lived in the front parlor of a funeral home. He had been to one once, for Mrs. O’Driscoll down the block. He remembered the way people nodded very somber, faces set and heads slowly shaking, edged up on the front of their chairs. If they spoke standing, they stood close, voices hushed like church.
Dylan sensed immense sorrow about the past, all the important stuff never spoken. It had to do with his brother David being gone. He never did seem like an older brother. He just stayed two years old. Dylan stared ahead, feeling the strong hand close tight on his shoulder, and hearing the quiet catch in her voice.
“…how important it is to have someone to care for you. So he and I went to the courthouse today to make sure everybody knows that for now, you are in my care. You will always be safe here. Do you understand, Dylan?”
“Yes’m. Does that mean he’s not my dad anymore?” He turned on the stoop, breath clutched, knees drawn up and pressed to his chest.
“Come closer. Keep your Nana warm, child. Your daddy will always be your daddy, ’til the day you die. Lots of things change in this world. Some of the change makes no sense if you muddle it a hundred lifetimes. But one thing can’t ever change—Sam Paxton is your daddy. Will be. Always.”
Nana squeezed him tight to her side, kissing him atop his head. “Time for another trim, already,” she mused, tousling his thick brown crew cut hair. He made a face.
“Today was just to make sure everybody knows, for now, I am your guardian.”
“Like an angel?” Dylan slipped under Nana’s arm, and watched a squirrel clamber across a snow-flecked branch in the front elm.
Nana’s mouth formed a happy Oh, her eyes shining.
“Yes, young Master Paxton. Like an angel. Your guardian angel. We will make do. And we sure do hope,” she said, now talking to the top branches of the naked elm, “that someday soon my son will be fit to be a father again. Make him well, if you’re awake up there, would you please?”
Nana and Dylan rose, turning to the door. She kept her eyes aloft for another moment. “Seems like you owe him that much,” she muttered.
“Sorry?”
Nana looked down at her grandson.
“Let’s go get us some cocoa, and maybe a cookie for you. And a biscuit for that silly dog.”
3 / The Hobbitmobile
Crane Ridge, Maryland 1966
The light from the midsummer sun shimmered off a cloud of gnats darting above the sparkling coffee-tinted river. The far bank looked like a living thing, a vivid emerald garden draped in a pulsing silver veil. Here, where the river skirted the north edge of Crane Ridge, it ran